Since the death of their son Matthew in 2008 in a Northwestern dormitory -- the freshman died after being encouraged by numerous upper class students to drink 17 shots of vodka in an hour in a drinking game; his fellow students did not call for emergency help; they simply put the unconscious Sunshine to bed, and he was dead by morning -- attorney Jeffrey Sunshine and physician Suzanne Fields have worked extensively on the issue of student abuse of alcohol. Among other activities, Sunshine has monitored the extensive settlement between the Sunshine family and Northwestern, and Fields, who is a professor at the SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine, has worked with the President of SUNY Stony Brook to establish the Red Watch Band Program, which has spread to dozens of other colleges and universities, including Northwestern.
A regular reader of this space, Sunshine wrote in to comment on Phil's Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative:
It was with more than a fleeting interest that I read President Hanlon's Moving Dartmouth Forward plan. Although the popular press has seized upon the Plan's new ban on hard liquor, that ban is not the essence of the new program. As we say in our family, "He gets it."
The underlying conditions at Northwestern University that were the cause of our son's death at the hands of his fellow students unfortunately exist at most of our so-called elite universities. They are what permitted multiple sober upper class Northwestern students for their amusement to trick and/or encourage an already intoxicated freshman to drink a lethal amount of alcohol, parade his unconscious body throughout the dormitory and write vulgar images on his face and body as he was dying, with no consequences for those who witnessed and encouraged and limited or no consequences for most of those who actively participated.
They are what permitted football players at Vanderbilt University to parade an unconscious female student though the dormitory and allegedly gang rape/and or sexually assault her with no consequences for anyone except the actual alleged perpetrators of the crimes.
They are what permitted dozens of students at Harvard and Dartmouth to engage in coordinated academic cheating.
They are what permitted Dartmouth students and students at other universities to engage in or witness debasing and illegal hazing activities for their own amusement, activities which in many cases had no connection with fraternities, but instead were connected to university-sponsored activities -- with no consequences to witnesses and usually none for active participants.
They are what permits Northwestern to say on its website a page entitled, Alcohol & Other Drug Resources -- Real NU Party Habits, "People often exaggerate the party lifestyle of college students," since, according to the same web page, only 39% of Northwestern student have had a blackout, 24% have gotten into fights and 14% have been injured due to alcohol or drug abuse -- as if this is somehow OK.
As Professor Clifford Nass wrote in the Stanford Daily in an op-ed entitled, Time to Stop the Alcohol Nonsense, commenting on a Stanford undergraduate who recently was brought to the emergency room with a blood alcohol level that had a 50% mortality rate: "Here is what happened in virtually every single alcohol incident (more than 25) I have encountered on campus (including the coin flip death)... A student or students other than the person who lands in the hospital knowingly provides a dangerous amount of alcohol to the student who becomes intoxicated. Multiple students watch the student drinking extremely large quantities of alcohol over a short period of time" and do not get help which is always available... Students carry the extremely ill student back to his dorm" and do not get help... Sometimes, one or more students "trick" or at least urge a student to drink a level that causes risk up to a 50% chance of death."
Other stores are legion, and easily found on the internet.
The simple fact is that these kinds of immoral and often illegal behaviors have no place on our college campuses. Yet they are common, open and notorious, and are accepted norms for college students, administrations and boards of trustees. When our son was killed at Northwestern, the reaction of administrators was to claim that they, too, were the victim of forces beyond their control. They rejected any notion that they had any control over the activities, behaviors and value system of students in their dormitories, on their campus (that was under the jurisdiction of their police force), and for whose care had been entrusted by their families and society for four years.
The underlying problem has been described by others. For example,
Professor Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame University in his article, From in Loco Parentis to Leviathan, recently wrote: "The lifting of in loco parentis rules on college campuses was done in the name of liberating students... Longstanding local rules and cultures that governed behavior through education of certain kinds of norms, manners and morals, came to be regarded as an oppressive limitation upon the liberty of individuals... Then, we see that absent such norms anarchy is the result."
Ross Douthat is a recent edit Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled Rape and the College Brand, wrote, "Over the last few generations, America's most prominent universities --both public and private -- have pursued a strategy of corporate expansion, furious status competition, and moral and pedagogical retreat. But the moral retreat has in certain ways been disguised: elite schools have abandoned any explicit role in policing the choices and shaping the character of their students, but they have masked that abdication in the nostrums of contemporary P.C. piety-promising diversity tolerance, safe spaces, etc., with what can feel like a preacher's sincerity and self-righteousness... But the modern university's primary loyalty is not really to liberalism or political correctness or any kind of ideological design: It is to the school's brand, status and bottom line."
Add to the above, the fact that over time many universities have replaced the municipal police forces with their own police, who fail to enforce the law when student-to-student crimes are involved. The result is predictable. College campuses have become enclaves where the standards and norms of civilized behavior and laws that apply virtually every place else, do not apply, at least when students are involved (I wonder if an intoxicated student assaulted and injured a university administrator, would the reaction of the university police would be the same?).
Now for President Hanlon's Plan. He knows that, "Policies alone will not create the change we seek on this campus." He knows that, " True change will come from individuals-and thereby student organizations-committing to live to a higher standard of behavior... To clarify what we expect of individuals, every student who enrolls in Dartmouth will sign a Code of Conduct that articulates the expectations -- as they relate to civility, dignity, diversity, community and safety -- for all members of the Dartmouth community... Moving forward it will be simple: Individuals and organizations that choose not to fulfill these higher standards will not be a part of our community."
In furtherance of this goal, President Hanlon's Plan has additional, concrete steps: residence community housing with graduate-students- and professors-in-residence, and with which each student will be associated for their entire stay at Dartmouth; increasing the presence of faculty and adult influences in the lives of students; Greek houses with active faculty/staff sponsors; and strengthening academic rigor.
Under President Hanlon, Dartmouth will no longer be in moral and pedagogical retreat. It will police the choices and shape the character of its students. He gets it.
In a comment to the an article in the Harvard Newspaper about the Harvard administration's alleged inadequate response to sexual assaults, Harvard Professor John Hamilton wrote, "The best way to understand this irresponsibility on the part of administration is to look at the nature of bureaucracy... bureaucracies are about themselves, not the people supposedly served. In the case of a university, the students are the paying customers who are technically served, but in accordance with the priorities of the school. Since the bureaucracy puts itself first, reports of rape on campus are suppressed... If the pace of an organization is set by the person at the top, replacing the person at the top at the top sends a clear message throughout the bureaucracy that the operative bureaucratic truth has changed."
President Hanlon, clearly is trying to change the truth at Dartmouth. And the message should be clear to other university presidents and boards of trustees. They need to change the truth at their university about what constitutes normal and acceptable behavior or they need to be replaced.